You, friend, have clicked on an article about an abnormally large chicken egg. And I am here to deliver it to you, in an amusing and factual way. Have a CRACK at keeping you aBREAST of the news of the day, which is:
On a farm just west of Cairns, a free-range hen has laid an 176 gram egg. That’s three times the size of an average egg, the farmers explain on their Facebook page. Better yet: the egg intriguingly contained a bonus, normal-sized egg inside! And egg scientists are baffled.
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“To be honest, I don’t really know how it’s come about,” Charles Sturt University veterinary professor Raf Freire told the ABC.
“Biologically I’m struggling to understand why that smaller egg never dropped out, it’s very odd.”
I agree. Freire posits a scenario wherein the hen “retained” an egg instead of laying it as normal, which happens occasionally when chickens are under stress. Usually in such an instance the egg will eventually just fall out of the chicken within a few hours. But Freire thinks perhaps some kind of internal eggception occurred.
“Rather than that egg being laid, like it usually is, what’s happened is that there’s been another ovum released,” he suggests.
“That’s come down and then the chicken has somehow decided to make its shell around both the previous day’s egg and the new ovum that’s come down.”
The ABC worryingly adds that “the farmers have not revealed how the chicken is faring.”
VICE will continue to update this story as we learn more.
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